Also showing, March 17

Untold StoriesDuchess Theatre, London WC2 There’s omelette Arnold Bennett — what would make an appropriate culinary tribute to Alan Bennett? A battenberg? The humble teacake so loved by his parents? More likely, the type of dense, tangy, built-to-last fruit cake his younger self receives here from his mother on completion of his National Service training. “I remember how well and how indistinguishably both she and my father had baked,” he observes, in what seems a metaphor for the steady, self-contained, harmonious home life that the young cuckoo Bennett found humdrum. This double bill of monologues, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks, offers tear-prickingly poignant and pithy Proustian excursions, though it’s dripping, glacé cherries, his mother’s fascination with cocktail parties, and the strains of The King of Love…

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